Maputo

By the time we reached Maputo, our last stop before the last country on our list in Africa, I was 3 months behind on the blog so, apart from one day taking in the sites of Maputo (one of Africa’s most attractive capitals, they say, which seems quite true), I spent most of my time trying to catch up in the hotel.

There are two things Mozambican hotels needn’t advertise as included in the price of a room: continental breakfasts and television. Mozambican hotels consistently serve the most depressing breakfasts I’ve ever seen, usually a bread roll with a slice of Kraft cheese and a neon coloured ‘fruit juice’ that mainly consists of sugar. The only thing worse than the continental breakfast is the range of available television channels, although I began to quite enjoy CNN after a while with its hyperactive presenters and variety of lisps. The scriptwriters on Richard Quest Means Business are quite clearly having a laugh at poor Richard’s expense. What IS nice is having walls that you can’t see through, bathrooms with actual and not theoretical hot water, toilet rolls with more than a suggestion of toilet paper and no notices telling you to not steal people’s food from the fridge and to clean the bathroom when you’ve finished with it.

After finally accepting that I would need more than two days to be completely up to date, we hopped on the most comfortable bus we’ve seen so far and waved goodbye to Maputo, Mozambique and Africa as we’d come to know it.